de Beauvoir, Simone (1908 - 1986)
French writer and feminist, and Existentialist. She is known primarily for her treatise The Second Sex. (1949), a scholarly and passionate plea for the abolition of what she called the myth of the eternal feminine. It became a classic of feminist literature during the 1960s.
Schooled in private institutions, de Beauvoir attended the Sorbonne, where, in 1929, she passed her agrgation in philosophy and met Jean-Paul Sartre, beginning a free, lifelong association with him. She taught at a number of schools (1931-43) before turning to writing for her livelihood. In 1945 she began editing Le Temps Modernes with Sartre.
Her novels expounded the major Existential themes, demonstrating her conception of the writers commitment to the times. She Came To Stay (1943) treats the difficult problem of the relationship of a conscience to the other. Of her other works of fiction, perhaps the best known is The Mandarins (1954), a chronicle of the attempts of post-World War II intellectuals to leave their mandarin (educated elite) status and engage in political activism. She also wrote four books of philosophy, including The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).
Several volumes of her work are devoted to autobiography that constitutes a telling portrait of French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1970s. In addition to treating feminist issues, de Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of aging, which she addressed in A Very Easy Death (1964), on her mothers death in a hospital. In 1981 she wrote A Farewell to Sartre, a painful account of Sartres last years.
Simone de Beauvoir revealed herself as a woman of formidable courage and integrity, whose life supported her thesis: the basic options of an individual must be made on the premises of an equal vocation for man and woman founded on a common structure of their being, independent of their sexuality.
Derrida, Jacques (b. 1930)
Born in Algeria, the foremost living French philosopher, whose work encompasses literature, linguistics, and psychoanalysis; could be described as the Hegel of our time, inasmuch as he opposes Marxs analysis of commodity fetishism as a form of alienation having its roots in bourgeois society, like Hegel, asserting rather, that alienation is a characteristic of all production.
Derrida studied at the cole Normale Suprieure in Paris, where he taught the history of philosophy from 1965. His first work was a translation, with introduction, of a section of a work on geometry by Edmund Husserl, followed in 1967 by a study of Husserl called Speech and Phenomena, the essays, Writing and Difference and, probably his most important work, Of Grammatology.
In line with the post-modern current of which he is part, Derrida rejects the search for certainty or meaning in the world. Derrida coined the word Deconstruction, which is a development of the work of Roland Barthes, a method of literary criticism which seeks to undermine an writers argument by uncovering unstated assumptions within the text, and in particular focuses on binary determinations which are challenged with the effect of calling the meaning of the text into question.
See his article Speech & Writing according to Hegel and an excerpt from Specters of Marx in which he argues against Marx from the standpoint of Hegel.
His later works include Glas (1974), Truth in Painting (1978), and The Postcard (1980).

